D88-91: Polymorphism and Inheritance - time to embrace my lead learner

Phew... I meant to do this everyday... but... I didn't.

AP CSA

I think I spent more time preparing for this week of lessons more than any other week of lessons in my life.  Polymorphism is a big topic and a confusing one.

On Tuesday I introduced UML diagrams and students worked on the FRQs.  Honestly, working on FRQs is probably the best use of time in class for learning AND for the AP test.  It also helps me see what students are still struggling with.

I wished I would have introduced UML diagrams back when I started classes in Sept/Oct.  They are helpful for organizing the basics.  I moved in to is-a and has-a relationships from there.  Again, has-a relationships could have been introduced later.  I think this might have been helpful back when we introduced classes as well.

I emphasized to students the importance of watching some videos before we got to day 89 which was going to be a big day for inheritance.  I also checked off their notes which were better than usual.

I went into a mini-lecture on inheritance with some examples that I had found from another teacher.  In the end, here's what my notes looked like.





I was SO glad I found this person's slides online.  They introduced things in a way that I would have never thought of!  More specifically, they highlighted issues that I, myself wouldn't have noticed.

One thing that came up in this was class casting which I was a little unsure of myself.

That's what we did on day 90.

Here's the video I watched to help myself prepare - it was the best example of when/why we cast that I have seen.




I am still struggling with what the best way is to show long code in class.  It is too small to fit all up on the board, so I printed it out for students.  I decided to do a tree example which looked a bit like this:



From there students worked on the "Structured Lab" - I felt like it was a bit too redundant, but I think students saw how the super class was to interact with the other levels.

On Monday when students get back we are going to apply what we know in a bunch of different contexts, so we will see how that goes!

CSP
I really loved unit 5 when I had smaller classes, but for my large class it is just too much to be able to understand how well students are grasping the content.  I think I need to do more exit tickets in this class for the basics (like declaring and updating variables).

I gave them a quiz which most students did pretty well, others are going to need a lot more attention.

Concepts
We are doing probability diagrams.  Today we did a stations activity which went pretty well.  I will be giving those students a lot more attention.

One Good Thing
Having an extra hour has been a game changer.  It came just in time.  This has hands down been the hardest week for me content wise and I survived!  I also was able to do activities with my concepts students in a much more intentional way.